Back in 2009, on the right, serving half of America’s 300-some odd million people was Fox News. That is all.
There was a huge opportunity there. Glenn Beck saw it and founded TheBlaze TV network from scratch, though that was an entirely different animal than buying a going concern. It was a risk. He became a zillionaire, but he could have easily found himself wearing a barrel.
We didn’t see this as purely charity; it was a way to potentially make a ton of dough while also helping to pop the political pimple that was progressivism. There was a huge opening that needed to be filled. Conservatives could turn on their old TV sets and have the choice of Fox News or a test pattern.
As awesome as Fox News was—and it was awesome, as anyone conscious and fighting liberalism in the dark times before Fox can attest—a lack of competition never makes the monopolist better. Monopolies will always get ossified, slower, and generally worse. That’s just how things are. The best thing that could happen to Fox was another voice on the right. We did that. We did well with NewsRight, but Fox reigns supreme.
I think our mistake at the beginning was using “right” in the name, but I was outvoted! We should have chosen a neutral name.
Next, we thought, why stop at news? Why not popular entertainment? If we wanted to change America, we had to change the culture. If we wanted to change the culture, we would have to participate in the culture, and popular entertainment was a huge part of it.
With the old model of centralized distribution dying in an age of digital movies and video on demand and all sorts of other venues, and with production costs dropping as the insatiable appetite for material grew, it was never easier or cheaper to get into the movie and TV business. And some of us conservatives invested. A few rich guys made a huge difference. And some of us made money too.
I would tell my rich guy friends, “Everyone wants your money. The movement needs your money. Stop just giving your money away. Demand results. Monitor the metrics. If your spending isn’t getting results, stop spending on the failure and start funding something else. It isn’t that hard. Remember how you got rich in the first place? Remember how you did it?”
Then I would tell them, “Do that again.”
Darren Dolby (Lawyer/Activist)
This well-known and flamboyant attorney represented some of the movement’s wealthy donors in lawsuits after government officials decided to try and intimidate them.
You know the old saying about not getting in a pissing contest with a guy who buys ink by the barrel? There’s a second part that gets less play: “Don’t screw with a guy who buys lawyers by the bushel.”
See that classic 2020 Corvette outside? I bought that new with part of the payoff after I hit the IRS and a bunch of its flunkies for $3,000,000 for auditing my client because he dared do what the Constitution allowed him to do and tell Hillary to go pound sand. I don’t like these damn modern electric cars, so I kept it—though it’s a bitch finding a gas station anymore!
Chapter Nine: The News
The conservative insurgency was never just about politics but about the entire culture, and the media was the voice and expression of that culture. Conservatives made a conscious effort to move into the news media. As more and more journalists chaffed under the politically correct constraints of the liberal establishment, and as technology allowed new entrants in the media to bypass the established gatekeepers, the media became more conservative. And the effects on society were pronounced.
David Chang (Conservative Media Host)
Chang’s snarling terrier interrupts our discussion to demand his master’s attention. In the other room, Chang’s husband, Luke, a high-end carpenter who makes expensive designer furniture, is fixing lunch. The enormous house—Chang has done incredibly well as a talk show host—is impeccably decorated. We are in what they call their “Gun Room.” The name is apt—the walls are covered with firearms of all makes and sizes.
“They’re all functional, of course,” Chang tells me. “Since we don’t have kids, some of them are loaded. When I was younger, every once in a while punks might try and beat up a gay couple, so I took my protection seriously. I still do. I never got why gays would back people who wanted to keep them vulnerable. Of course, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about that either and it just made them hate me more. I had to break through prejudice all right—about my conservatism. I knew I wanted to be in media, and it was pretty clear if I wanted to do that I needed to do it myself.”
I was a traitor because I thought for myself. So I said, “The hell with it,” and started an Internet show. It was right during the 2016 election season. I was a Chris Christie guy, though soon I became one of his biggest critics. He had spent years telling the Tea Partiers “screw you,” and so no one should have been surprised when, on primary election night in Iowa, they returned the favor. Of course, then he got mad, quit the GOP when it was clear there was no place for him, and ran in 2020 as an independent spoiler and got Hillary reelected.
So, after Hillary was elected, there we were facing another four years of what they liked to call “fundamental transformation,” and what we called “screwing up the country.” I had never really thought about what I would do with my show after the election, so I just kept doing it even as I was halfheartedly being a lawyer. It took a while, but I built an audience and when the “pros” came to me it was with a pile of money because I had a built-in audience. Bye-bye legal career.
The mainstream media was dying, and we would laugh at its death throes, but it wasn’t dead quite yet. We needed to help it along.
What we needed to do, as conservatives, was fight the very concept of a “mainstream media.” The MSM [Mainstream Media] presupposed the gatekeeper function that it was desperately trying to preserve for itself. Gatekeepers have inordinate power; we conservatives needed to dissipate that power. To do that, we needed to get a wider variety of viewpoints out via the media.
In other words, we needed more conservative media targeted at everyday Americans—the ones for whom politics was not a 24/7 obsession.
There were three ways to do this. The first was actually the simplest: we would buy existing media platforms. Of course, unless you are trying to buy Newsweek—remember that from the doctor’s office as a kid? It got sold for about a dollar during the Obama years. Anyway, buying media took money. Obviously, the vast majority of us weren’t going to go buy a newspaper or a broadcast network, but a few rich guys could, and that was huge.
The second way was to infiltrate. Go in and be a part of the monster. Be like a virus—get in there and infest it and change it. That wasn’t for me. I never wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to sound off! I wanted people to pay attention to me!
[From the other room, Luke’s voice booms, “Some things never change!” Chang furrows his brow, pets the terrier, which growls, and then continues.]
The third way was the way most of us had to do it, and it was way, way tougher. We had to do it ourselves.
Technology made it possible. You could buy a mic, a video camera, and a laptop computer and you could have a show. There were these services that would transmit your shows over the Internet, and conservatives were suddenly up and making product. A lot was awful, but they kept at it. It was an incubator for conservative media talent. You would get these guys just making their Internet shows and pretty soon they would be on “real” radio. They would make their mistakes where no one saw them! Major players like Larry O’Connor, Derek Hunter, and Tony Katz got their start just like me, you know, just kind of putting on a show. Except it wasn’t out in a barn—it was on the net.